“There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.” – Genesis 6, Verse 4 – The King James Version

Willie Mays was a Giant. He was a New York Giant, who took possession of center field at the Polo Grounds in 1951, a time when, just across the Harlem River at Yankee Stadium, his boyhood hero Joe DiMaggio still occupied the same position for the New York Yankees. He remained a New York Giant when the retiring Yankee Clipper yielded to the next Yankee superstar in an unbroken line going back to the Dead Ball Era of the 1910s – a teenage phenom from Oklahoma just younger than Mays named Mickey Mantle, who was one of the very few ballplayers in any era to rival Willie in talent. Mays remained a Giant when the storied franchise joined the Brooklyn Dodgers in a monumental (and much lamented in Brooklyn and Manhattan) move to the West Coast, becoming the San Francisco Giants. In all, he was a New York/San Francisco Giant for more than twenty seasons.

And in those 20+ seasons (including 2 more years in a curtain-call appearance in a New York that loved him with the Mets) he was a Giant of the Game. He was the greatest fielding outfielder in the history of baseball. He hit 660 home runs, 6th in baseball history (even as his power numbers dropped precipitously after he turned 35); he hit over .300 for his career; his career WAR (Wins Above Replacement) is 5th all-time and higher than Ty Cobb’s.

There will always be arguments over who was the Greatest Baseball Player of All Time. This can be asserted confidently: no one was ever better than Willie Mays.

But I believe Willie Mays was always a Giant.

My father was a Giant, too, in one of the many senses that Willie Mays was a Giant. My father was also born in Alabama, 15 months before Willie. He was born on a cotton farm. He did have the advantage of being born white, which was not inconsequential in the Jim Crow South, but he was born into the same poverty and the same Great Depression and into the same hot, stifling, working man-defeating summers that Willie knew.

My father’s older brothers were away fighting, in Europe and in the Pacific, during World War II. His father – my grandfather – took a job in town at a steel mill for the duration of the war; it was good money that the family needed, a rare opportunity to “get ahead.” But the crop – the cotton crop – had to be made. The farm had to be worked. My father did it. He made the crop. All by himself.

He was 14 years old.

Willie was already playing professional baseball when he was sixteen. He was in high school. He was an adolescent who had a job that required him to get hits off of Satchel Paige and to run down blasts by Elston Howard. And he lived every day of his young life in a rigidly segregated society – from the time Willie was 6 years old until he was the Most Valuabe Player in the National League Bull Connor ran the Birmingham police department.

There is something else my father shared with Willie Mays; when they were just starting their working careers (and while their families were very dependent on their income) both were called on for military service during the Korean War. My father – a United States Marine – was sent to the war zone; Mays served stateside. But Mays lost two of his prime seasons to serve his country. I have never heard any record of him complaining.

As it is written in Genesis, there were Giants in the earth in those days.

My father died in October of 1990. We took him back to northeast Alabama, not terribly far from where he was born, to bury him. A Marine honor guard played “Taps” and presented my mother with a flag. He would have liked that. And he was home.

In the mid 1980s, Sports Illustrated printed an article about Willie Mays. Mays was in Birmingham for the interview, where he had maintained a residence his entire life, through all of his baseball fame and success. He kept a Chrysler New Yorker in Birmingham, with the Alabama vanity license plate “Say Hey.” His local phone number – as his phone numbers at his other residences in New York and San Francisco – ended in “2424.”

Willie decided to take the SI reporter to Rickwood Field, the site of his first remarkable success, the playground of his memorable youth. As the reporter told it in 1985:

Suddenly, he seems the happiest of men. The laughter comes as such a startling and gratifying intrusion on the general sobriety that it becomes infectious. He is laughing now, driving haphazardly on and off the labyrinthine Birmingham freeway system. Memories have cheered him. “We played at old Rickwood Field,” he says. “The ball park’s still here. They’ve kept it up. It’s almost historical. I know it’s right around here somewhere.” He drives for 20 minutes over interstate highways 59 and 20, mumbling now about how the city has changed so much he can’t find anything anymore, not even this seminal ballpark. Finally, he gives up.

Sometimes, even a Giant loses his way. Sometimes the greatest ballplayers never reach first base. But the object is to return home.

I would like to think that last Tuesday night (June 18), with a sellout crowd under the lights at Rickwood Field for the first game there in years, that Willie Howard Mays, Jr. – a Giant of the Game and a 5’10” Giant of a Man – made it home. To his true home. One more time.

Tim Whitt is the author of Bases Loaded With History: The Story of Rickwood Field, America’s Oldest Baseball Park. He wrote this for al.com.